Work with custom product attribute without loading the product object itself

Question

I need to manipulate a custom product attribute for almost all products in the database. Right now I have this:

$productsCollection = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')->getCollection();

        foreach ($productsCollection as $_product) {
            $product = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')->load($_product->getEntityId());
            if ($product->getCustomizableonly() === null) {
                $product->setData('customizableonly', 0)->getResource()->saveAttribute($product, 'customizableonly');
            }
        }

But the products are more than 2000 and therefore I don't want to load the product object itself, but to work just with the product object instance from the collection. The problem is that this obj. instance contains only 1/9th of the whole Data of the product object itself. And the 'customizableonly' attribute is NOT part of that 1/9th.

How can I access the attribute without making unnecessary object loading. Or in general - how can this code be optimized to maximum, so it is not dramatically slow in case of 2000+ products?

Answer 1

Get your collection like this.

$productsCollection = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')->getCollection()->addAttributeToSelect('customizableonly');

And here is an other way of updating all products at once so you don't have to call saveAttribute 2k times.
From what I understand, you want to set the value for customizableonly to 0 for all the products that don't have that value.
Here goes:

$toUpdate = array();
foreach ($productsCollection as $_product) {
    if (is_null($_product->getCustomizableonly())) {
        //remember the id for update
        $toUpdate[] = $_product->getId();
    }
}

//update all products
Mage::getSingleton('catalog/product_action')->updateAttributes($toUpdate, array('customizableonly'=>0), 0);  

This should get you a boost in speed.